Preventing high school dropouts

The TITA project started in 2014 and will run for three years. It is funded by the European Commission, and equips decision makers and multi-disciplinary teams on the ground and their trainers with tools for taking action to prevent high school dropouts. Within TITA project, Céreq is in charge of the assessment of the experiments in France, Luxembourg and Switzerland.

Céreq’s assessments

The assessment protocol in these three countries has been designed to allow international comparisons, as well as to permit to perceive local particularities. If each experiment has a peculiar form, all of them are dedicated to early school leaving (ESL) prevention within schools. In this context, Céreq’s assessments aim to analyse practices and tools that exist in the schools to prevent ESL. The assessment protocol is based on a mixed comprehensive and statistical method, supposed to take place in three different waves – following the three years of the TITA project.

In France, the experiment is developed by the ministry of Education and consists of “GPDS” generalization: GPDS means an “ESL prevention group” supposed to be a cross-categorial team of education professionals, working together to prevent the drop out phenomenon in each French secondary school.

For the first two years of assessment, Céreq’s activity consists of studying the cross-categorial collaborative work within these GPDS, throughout a representative sample of 150 schools allocated among 3 education regional authorities. At first, a one-year period will be dedicated to the analysis of GPDS operating modes. Then, a second one will aim to study the operating modes of GPDS after one year of official generalization. These two waves of assessment will follow the same method: first, an interviews campaign is led within 12 schools; this qualitative work requires to interview around 10 people in each school, so over 100 interviews (104 were realised the first year). Then a statistical survey is submitted to the whole sample of schools, which means a total of approximatively 1500 people (1588 people received a questionnaire the first year).

Finally, the third wave of the French assessment will specifically concern a new tool: the “training platform” that will be offered by the French Education Institute (IFE) to the GPDS members, in order to improve the GPDS efficiency. To assess this resource website, Céreq team will use a randomized method and divide the schools sample into two groups: on the one hand, schools where teams use the training platform; and on the other hand, schools where teams cannot use the training platform. The aim is to study the potential benefits of this tool for the GPDS functioning.

In Luxembourg, two different experiments are developed within the context of TITA project. The first one is led by the CPOS, the national center for scholar guidance and psychology, and consists of a questionnaire submitted to pupils in order to spot the ones who could present a risk of early school leaving. This project is developed within two high schools of Luxembourg city. The second experiment is led in the northern Luxembourg and gathers 6 secondary schools directors, who constitute a reflection group concerning the possible ways to tackle ESL and the system changes they would imply. For these two experiments, the Céreq’s assessment will be quite the same as the French one, which means two different waves of mixed analyses about the experiments, and then a third year of assessment that will concern IFE’s platform.

The assessment in Switzerland is not so precisely defined yet, due to the late integration of this country to the TITA project. Céreq and Swiss teams are in contact and currently preparing the research protocol which will fit the most to the Swiss context.

Seminar in Marseille (Thursday, 29th and Friday, 30th of September 2016)

All the partners involved in the TITA project (“Team cooperation to fight early school leaving: Training, Innovative, Tools and Actions”) gathered in Marseille for two study days at the invitation of the Céreq team. Researchers, actors and representatives from the education systems in Slovenia, Spain, Luxembourg, Switzerland and France worked on the preliminary results of Céreq’s international survey of collaborative practices in preventing early school leaving.The partners also worked on the implementation of the training platform “Tita platform ”, assessment of which by Céreq is about to begin.